Story and tone

The film picks up five dragon-years after The Hidden World. Hiccup (Mason Thames) has settled into chieftain duties, Astrid (Nico Parker) commands the village guard, and Toothless splits his time between the hidden valley and low-altitude joyrides over Berk’s redesigned harbor. Trouble arrives in the form of sky-pirates who fly armored war kites—think Norse hang-gliders strapped to fireworks. When those raiders kidnap a clutch of hatchlings, Hiccup rounds up the old riders, straps on updated flight gear, and launches the sort of rescue mission that made the first film a rite of passage for a generation of grade-schoolers.

DeBlois keeps the tone balanced: enough quiet fish-hut scenes to remind everyone why Berk matters, enough high-altitude peril to make palms sweat. The humor is gentler now—more character banter, fewer physical gags—but it never tips into self-importance. In one charming side beat, Fishlegs tries to potty-train a baby Hobgobbler, it goes about as well as you’d expect.

Animation and design

 DreamWorks artists lean into painterly textures. Clouds smear across the sky like pastel chalk, and dragon scales pick up northern-lights reflections when the action shifts to midnight latitudes. The new kite vessels borrow shapes from gull wings and Viking sails, so they feel handmade instead of steampunk. Even flight physics get an upgrade: Toothless stalls mid-loop, Hiccup adjusts the prosthetic tail fin, the camera wobbles just enough to remind you that air’s a slippery road. I saw it in laser projection—the deep blacks helped—but early word from critics who caught press screeners on standard projectors suggests the detail will hold once the movie starts to stream online.

Voice performances

 Mason Thames still gives Hiccup that underdog rasp, only now there’s a touch of morning-meeting fatigue in his delivery—chieftain life apparently involves a lot of paperwork. Nico Parker keeps Astrid’s confidence razor-sharp, and their back-and-forth feels like two people who’ve argued over dinner bills for a decade.

Music and sound

 Composer John Powell revisits the themes you can’t hum without picturing blue skies, but he threads in Nordic fiddles and frame drums to mark the franchise’s move into slightly older territory. The big flight anthem still swells, but now it shares space with quieter, string-plucked motifs for the hatchling dragons. Sound designers layer wind shear over every dive and let silence sit for a full breath when Hiccup reaches out a hand to an injured raider mount. Those choices land even in a modest theater, so they should translate nicely to home setups once the film makes its online release.

Themes

 At its core, the story weighs legacy against curiosity. Hiccup thinks he’s done expanding Berk’s worldview, the hatchlings remind him evolution never clocks out. The raiders, for their part, aren’t faceless brutes—one of them sketches flight diagrams that look suspiciously like early Hiccup blueprints. The film suggests progress can sprout in unexpected corners, but it also warns that innovation untied to empathy burns everything it touches. Small lesson, big dragon wings.

How to watch How to Train Your Dragon

DreamWorks and Universal have not yet announced digital or streaming dates, industry patterns suggest Peacock will get the first subscription window, with 4 K rentals on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube Movies to follow.

Pros

•  Animation shoves painterly surfaces and does not compromise clarity.
•  Sky-pirate technologies are rough and humane.
•  Generational inheritance and survival is a subject matter that sounds without being didactic.

Cons

•  Of the supporting Vikings, Snotlout is given most screen time.
•  The last fight plays on dusk lightings that can muddle the details on smaller screens.

Final verdict

 How to Train your Dragon turned out to be some kind of lightning conductor to the family animation in 2010. It is not a follow-up that runs after the thunder in 2025, it tries to go on warm thermals instead and relies on even richer textures and maturity of characters rather than further explosion. The reward is a movie that does justice to memory of its fans as well as pushing the franchise forward. You will exit with the ancient song in your head and with the thought of what happens when the culture doesn t polish its trophies any more but wants to know what comes next. See it in a cinema where you can, the sky is too big to be painstakingly pixelized by streaming services, but remember to tune into the one you prefer to watch when it appears.